Tuesday, April 29, 2014

Mahābhārata, Part I: The big ... everything

Photos by your humble blogkeeper

The Mahābhārata consists of 100,000 verses plus long passages of prose and, by one account, 1,660,020,000 people die in it. Complete translations, near as such a thing is possible, fill 18 or 19 volumes.

My favorite character so far (Dhritarāshtra, a king in one of the two family factions in the war that forms the work's core), starts to complain, and, this being the Mahābhārata, he goes on complaining for 60 verses, each ending with: O Sanjaya I had no hope of success. The song is a kind of reverse "Dayenu," and the rhythm induced by the repetition is beguiling. Complaints are a marvelous way to tell a story, invested each reported fact or incident with urgency.

It depends upon what you mean by "biggest." Do you mean quantitative or qualitative? I could be a bit flippant and say that 40 -- given its recurrence in the Bible -- might be the biggest in terms of symbolic, qualitative significance. Of course, that evades and trivializes your question. Sorry.

As for oral transmission, I suspect that repetition of the kind I mentioned in this post were aids to memory and oral transmission. I have read scholarly opinion that the standard epithets in Homer could have served a similar function. So oral transmission may not be as far-fetched as we think.

As for oral "texts" becoming written texts, who can say whether or not the written text faithfully represents the oral versions.

In the case of Homer, for example, I have long surmised that our written versions are different from the many oral versions that were circulating through the years prior to the writing of one version. The recitations of the oral versions were really improvisations upon the framework of themes and outlines.

R.T., I think we express similar thoughts about oral transmission and the multiplicity of versions this may imply. I wonder where the idea that authenticity inhered in word-for-word repetition and transmission originated.

We have always been suckers for the inerrant written word. There is something in our DNA. We see something printed, we tend to believe it as gospel. (I intend the pun!) We hear people talk to us, we may be less committed to belief. We see something they have written, we are already on our way to being convinced. Argue any sacred text with a believer and you quickly discover the depth of the issue.

One can't say we have always been suckers for the inerrant written word, since words were not always written. I have read that the earliest examples of cuneiform that we have are of mundane business accounts, rather than of Gilgamesh or some law code. So the question is not when writing was invented, but when critical reading first appeared.

Patrick: I started reading the Ganguli translation, which is available free online. Then I bought the Penguin Classics version, selected and translated by John D. Smith, which has all kinds of good introductory and supplementary material.

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This blog is a proud winner of the 2009 Spinetingler Award for special services to the industry and its blogkeeper a proud former guest on Wisconsin Public Radio's Here on Earth. In civilian life I'm a copy editor in Philadelphia. When not reading crime fiction, I like to read history. When doing neither, I like to travel. When doing none of the above, I like listening to music or playing it, the latter rarely and badly.
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